The 1975 Banqiao Dam failure was the collapse of 62 dams in Henan, China under the influence of Typhoon Nina of 1975. The dam failure created the third-deadliest flood in history which affected a total population of 10. 15 million. The official documents of the disaster were declassified in 2005 by the Chinese government.
About 1975 Banqiao Dam failure in brief
The 1975 Banqiao Dam failure was the collapse of 62 dams in Henan, China under the influence of Typhoon Nina of 1975. The dam failure created the third-deadliest flood in history which affected a total population of 10. 15 million and inundated around 30 cities and counties of 12,000 square kilometers. The official documents of the disaster were declassified in 2005 by the Chinese government. The design of the dams overly focused on the purpose of water storage while overlooking the capacities of preventing floods. Some experts have also pointed out that the Great Leap Forward as well as \”Learn from Dazhai in agriculture\” severely damaged the ecosystem and forest cover in the region, which was a major cause of the flood, and the government’s mishandling of the dam failure, however, further contributed to the casualties. The Great Floods in China’s History, a book prefaced by Qian Zhengying who served as the Minister of Water Resources of China in the 1970s and 1980s, revealed part of the information to the public for the first time in the 1990s.
In May 2005, the banqiao dam failure was rated No. 1 in ‘The Ultimate 10 Technological Disasters’ of the world by Discovery Channel outranking the Chernobyl nuclear disaster. The collapse occurred during the Chinese Cultural Revolution, when most people were busy with the ‘revolution’ and had little time to prevent the disaster. In fact, there were no resources or equipment available to prevented the floods, according to several experts, who were afraid to express their opinions in public lest they be condemned for ‘questioning Chairman Mao’s Cultural Revolution’ The sluice gates were not able to handle the overflow of water at 7uice due to blockage due to sedimentation. On August 6, a request to open the dam was rejected because of the existing flooding in downstream areas. The water was largely lost due to communication with the dam due to the dam failures, largely due to loss of the communication with. the dam. The total death toll from the disaster is estimated between 85,600 and 240,000, and 6. 8 million houses were destroyed.
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This page is based on the article 1975 Banqiao Dam failure published in Wikipedia (as of Dec. 11, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
